Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For more information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com
This is an edited version of Lord Ashcroft’s presentation to the International Democracy Union Forum, held last week in Washington, DC
We are not even a year into Donald Trump’s second term as president, but politics being what it is, attention is already turning to what comes next. My latest research looks at how things are shaping up on both sides of the divide and what this tells us about prospects both for the midterms and the race for 2028.
Let’s start with the President, who was elected for a second time by an extraordinary coalition of voters drawn from a much broader cross-section of American society than any Republican in living memory. How do they see things a year on from their decision?
Most Trump voters say the country is on the right track, but it depends which kind of Trump voters you ask. Around 13 per cent of his voters – easily enough to have swayed the last election, and probably the next one – say they did so as the lesser of two evils. These people largely put their reservations to one side and backed him because they thought he was more likely to deliver than his opponent. Nearly half of these voters say the US is heading in the wrong direction, with only just over one third saying the opposite.
One reason for this quickly becomes clear when we ask them to compare things to a year ago. More than half of Trump enthusiasts claim that they are better off than they were a year ago, but negative Trump voters were more likely to say they felt worse off than better off. We see the same gap when we look at expectations for the future – which matters because sorting out the economy, and especially prices, was exactly what these people were electing him to do.
Here we see how important various issues are to Americans, and how well President Trump is doing on those issues in the eyes of the voters for whom they are a priority. Inflation and the cost of living are at the top of voters’ agenda by a huge margin. But as we can see, the voters – including many of his own – give him low marks for his performance on the issue so far. Trump also finds himself on the wrong side of the chart when it comes to the economy and jobs, another major part of his raison d’être.
Not until we get down to immigration and the border do we find an issue on which President Trump is in positive territory. Though he scores relatively high marks in this area, it was only a top three issue for just over one third of his enthusiastic voters and only just over a quarter of the more hesitant ones. It has also created tensions of its own within the Trump-voting coalition. While there is wide support for closing the border with Mexico, we found some Trump voters very queasy about the spectacle of ICE enforcement officers raiding businesses and detaining suspected illegal migrants in American cities.
All of this helps to explain why more than one third of reluctant Trump voters describe his second presidency as “bad” or “worse than I expected”. In a separate question, I also found a majority of this group saying that Trump was using the office of president to take revenge on his political opponents, and just under half saying he was acting in his own self-interest rather than America’s.
Since he burst onto the political scene a decade ago, many voters have made a trade-off between the way Trump behaves and the things they hoped he would do for them. A clear majority of our reluctant Trump voters – 60% – agree that “he’s achieving some good things, but I don’t like the way he operates”. As my research has shown, these good things include closing the border, his action on gender and women’s sport, a more robust stance internationally and, for some, scaling back the influence of DEI in both the public and private sectors.
But unless more voters start to feel a real increase in their living standards, that number will start to bleed rapidly into the section that says, “he’s not achieving anything good, and I don’t like the way he operates”. These focus group quotes from “Grumpy Trumpers” illustrate the point.
While most think the second Trump presidency is more disciplined and professional than the first, many think these qualities are being applied to the wrong things. One example is tariffs. While some applaud the long-term aim of rebalancing trade and bringing jobs back to America, others link them directly to rising prices, meaning they think his policies are achieving the opposite of what they elected him to do.
Another example is what one described to us as his “revenge tour”, threatening or instigating legal action against his perceived critics and opponents – now including our own BBC.
If voters feel their life is getting better, Trump behaving like Trump is just the cost of doing business. But without delivery on those things, the Donald Trump Show is all there is.
The upshot of all this is that only 12% of his more reluctant voters strongly approve of his performance, while nearly 4 in 10 of them already say they disapprove of the job he’s doing. You might ask why this matters, if he’s not going to be on the ballot in 2028. Indeed, that might be how he looks at it himself. The answer, of course, is that whether or not his presidency is judged a success by the wavering voters who elected him has huge implications for what happens next.
While it is early days to talk about a successor, we can see how people react to some of the names that are already being talked about. This chart shows how favourable Trump voters are to various political characters, and also how familiar – that is, the proportion who have an opinion one way or the other.
Everyone has an opinion about Donald Trump, and nearly 9 in 10 of his enthusiastic voters say their view is positive – but this falls to just over half of those who voted for him more reluctantly. Vice President JD Vance is also near-universally known but his favourability rating, though high among Republicans, is clearly a notch below Trump’s. We found in our groups that while many see Vance as a more disciplined face of Trumpism, his loyalist status cuts both ways – some who voted for Trump see Vance as a “yes-man” or a “puppet”, who seems less authentic and relatable than his boss.
Next in terms of both familiarity and favourability is the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who commands similar ratings among Republicans as a whole but significantly lower numbers among our reluctant Trump voters. His name was often mentioned unprompted by participants in our focus groups. Clearly, the fortunes of both Vance and Don Jr. are completely tied to the president’s.
To an extent, the same is true for Marco Rubio, who is also widely spoken of as a potential nominee in 2028, but who is further behind in terms of both favourability and visibility. As Secretary of State, we foreigners might be more familiar with him than many Americans. In our focus groups, people often confused him with Ron DeSantis, the other guy from Florida, who occupies a similar position on the chart.
Whoever ends up taking the party forward, the voters – and certainly most Republicans – tend to think that American politics has changed under Trump for the long term. Democrats are more divided – indeed they are slightly more likely than not to say that Trump is a one-off and things will go back to how they were when he leaves the scene. If this is wishful thinking, it’s not the only example, as we will see from what follows.
As we all know, a party’s recovery from an election defeat must start with a proper understanding of why they lost. All the evidence is that the Democrats are still some way off such a reckoning. When we asked Americans as a whole to choose the reasons for last year’s result, the most popular were that “Donald Trump offered a vision that many Americans found attractive” and that “Too many people felt worse off than they had four years previously”.
For Democrats, however, the single most important reason is that “Too many people couldn’t accept the idea of a woman being president”. Almost as many think “The voters were short-sighted and didn’t realise what was at stake” and that “Voters were misled by misinformation or disinformation”. Next was that “Too many people couldn’t accept the idea of a person of colour being president”. In other words, the voters were sexist, the voters were ignorant, the voters were stupid, and the voters were racist – hardly the most promising platform from which to build a popular recovery.
All of which suggests that, on the first of their challenges, the Democrats as a whole have yet to wake up and smell the coffee – or, in their case, the vanilla soy latte.
Meanwhile, when it comes opposing the Trump administration, even Democrats are more likely than not to think their party is doing either a bad job or a terrible job. The riposte to this is a successful round of elections last month, in which they picked up the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, not to mention Zohran Mamdani’s victory to become Mayor of New York. But while the two new governors campaigned as moderate pragmatists, Mamdani certainly didn’t, describing himself as a democratic socialist and promising city-owned grocery stores and free public transport. While these very different approaches can work in localised elections, the party will need a more unified message going into the midterms and especially in the run-up to 2028.
Just over half of Democrats say they think the party should develop a more moderate and less divisive policy agenda than the president’s. On the face of it, that sounds like a step away from the platform of the Biden-Harris years. But it all depends on your definition of “moderate”. It was clear from our research that to a lot of Democrats, things like open borders and a radical approach to trans rights are perfectly moderate policies, and the only divisive thing is to oppose them.
I also think that to some degree there is a contest between head and heart in the Democratic movement. Some of them know intellectually that middle-of-the-road voters with no real love of Trump were put off by some of the Democrats’ ideas, and that the smart thing would be to re-evaluate – it’s just that they don’t want to. Which suggests that any move to the centre would be tactical, not from conviction – and voters are pretty good at telling the difference.
The first test of this will be next year’s mid-terms, when Trump won’t be on the ticket but his record will be. The last time this happened, in 2018, the Democrats regained the House and effectively ended Trump’s legislative agenda.
If that happens again and they re-take the House in 2026, I think they will face a similar dilemma. Many are itching to impeach him one last time, even though they know the smart thing to do would be to focus on the pocketbook issues that really matter to voters.
Other indicators from my research suggests that at this stage, most Democrats are in no mood to compromise with the electorate. Only a small minority of them – and remember, these are the people who will ultimately choose the party’s direction in the shape of their next presidential nominee – think they need to understand and reach out to people who have recently voted for Trump. Instead, they want to motivate the Democratic base and voters who didn’t turn out in recent elections.
Part of the reason for this, as my focus groups confirmed in abundance, is that that many Democrat loyalists think that people who have voted for Trump are simply beyond the pale. As we saw above, many Democrats tend to think of them as racist, sexist and stupid, and therefore not to be reasoned with. Indeed, we often heard that many Trump voters would realise for themselves that they had voted against their own interests and return to the path of righteousness of their own accord. As one put it to us, “I don’t think we could change their minds. They have to feel the pain themselves.”
Accordingly, there is also little appetite in Democratic ranks for a major rethink of their policies, ideas and values. Nearly two thirds of them say their policies and ideas are basically right, they just need to do a better job of persuading people. In a separate question, they were also more likely to want the party to adopt more liberal, progressive policies and candidates rather than more moderate, centrist policies and candidates.
Which leads to the question of who those candidates will be. Looking at the Democrat equivalent of our earlier chart, we see Kamala Harris way out in front in terms of both familiarity and favourability. Combined with their widespread belief that she would have done better last year if only she’d had more time to campaign, this ought to make her the front-runner for the 2028 nomination. Yet strangely enough, when we asked Democrats in focus groups who they would like to see in the running, her name was barely mentioned. And though some still talk about Bernie Sanders with affection, they also know that that ship has probably sailed.
Interestingly, two names that did regularly crop up share exactly the same position on our chart – California Governor Gavin Newsom, and radical New York member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or AOC. Jasmine Crockett, another outspoken Congresswoman from Texas, is also clearly making an impression among younger Democrats, judging from our groups. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who hopes to corner the pragmatic centrist vote in any primary run, still clearly has some work to do.
I found Democrats more likely than not to say it was important to stick to the rules of politics, while Trump voters thought it was more important to get things done, whatever the conventions. Many of them say they want a unifier, a moderate, and someone who can restore some civility.
At the same time, listening to them talk, it is clear that what many Democrats really want is their own version of Donald Trump, with all of what they regard as his dark arts. As one told us, “We don’t play dirty enough. If you’re sparring with someone and they’re not following the rules, what’s the point of you following the rules?”
If the Democrats are in the mood to double down rather than reach out to voters who have rejected them, does it mean they can’t win? Certainly not – although it makes it harder than it would otherwise be.
For all the baggage he brings, the absence of Donald Trump must be a net negative for the Republicans. He has transcended politics, brought people into the party, turned them out at elections, and brought his party together in a way that seemed impossible during the 2016 primaries. If his second term ends badly, they will be saddled with his record while losing the advantages he brings. If things go well, he will be the toughest act for any Republican to follow.
But his departure will also deprive the Democrats of a powerful galvanising force. More than one third of Kamala Harris voters said they turned out to stop Trump. In recent elections, he has provided arguably the single biggest boost to Democratic turnout, and for all his time in politics, internal disputes on the left have taken a back seat to loathing for their common enemy.
In that sense – and this is not something you hear every day – Donald Trump has been the nation’s Uniter-in-Chief. Whether as the hero or the villain, for a decade he has been the glue that held both sides together. If not exactly a bridge, he has at least been a bond, lending strength and coherence not just to his own side but to his opponents.
Strange as it may seem, one way or another they will both miss him when he’s gone.
Full report and data at LordAshcroftPolls.com.
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